My Brave Face (1989)

Performer: Paul McCartney                                 Writers: Paul McCartney & Elvis Costello
Highest US Chart Position: #25                           Label: Capitol Records
Musicians: Paul & Linda McCartney, Hamish Stuart, Paul Wickens and Chris Whitten

Flowers in the Dirt was Paul McCartney’s last great album. What made the album so memorable for me was that it was also the only time I saw McCartney in concert. It was in the Seattle Kingdome and I went with my on-and-off girlfriend at the time. By then I had thoroughly digested all of the songs on the album and along with the plethora of hits, both Wings and Beatles, that he played in the show it remains my favorite concert of all time. “My Brave Face,” co-written with Elvis Costello, was the first single release. The album certainly benefited from the inclusion of Costello in the writing process. I remember watching an interview with him about writing this particular song. McCartney was apparently squeamish about the bridge because it sounded so Beatle-esque, but Costello told him in no uncertain terms that he needed to stop apologizing for being a member of one of the greatest acts in rock ‘n’ roll history. Of course it’s going to sound like the Beatles, because he was a Beatle. Though Costello only helped with three of the songs on the album, the entire thing benefits from the permission Costello gave McCartney to just be himself. The bass player hadn’t produced an album this good since 1982’s Tug of War, and he hasn’t made one as good since.

The song begins with an a capella vocal chorus on the first two bars singing, “My brave, my brave, my . . . brave . . . face.” The band enters on the downbeat of the last syllable with McCartney hitting the tonic on one and playing a triplet figure on three and four all through the intro and verse. The intro ends with the distinctive electric guitar line that is heard throughout the song, while at the end of the verse well-placed acoustic guitar strums can be heard. Both Hamish Stuart and McCartney play guitar on the track, so it’s difficult to know exactly who plays which part. The Beatle-esque bridge is a nice contrast to the rest of the song, a sort of descending then rising chord progression with jangling guitars is followed by a forceful chorus that ends with the dense vocals of the title line and, just like the opening, the instruments dropping out on the last line. It’s at this point that McCartney really indulges in some Fab Four material with a double acoustic and electric guitar line between another repetition of the drawn out title line, this time using some distinctive acoustic twelve-string picking prior to the third verse. After that verse the song goes right into another bridge, and into the chorus McCartney goes up an octave on the vocals. Paul Wickens’ organ keyboard patch and the bright, percussive sound of Chris Whitten’s drums create a terrific backdrop for the song throughout, and it ends with the twelve-string line and the vocals holding out the last syllable.

By this time in the late eighties, MTV was nothing like what it had been originally: a video radio station. Instead it became dominated by very unoriginal original programming and because pop music had also changed I had stopped watching several years before. But looking now at the video that was made for the song, it’s pretty corny. The bulk of the video is fine, a faux live performance with the group shot primarily in black and white, and Macca playing his Hofner bass, very appropriate considering his embracing of the past when writing the song with Costello. In fact, it was Costello who urged the bassist to use the instrument on the album. The conceit is that an equally faux Japanese collector of Beatle memorabilia is making a cloak and dagger attempt to steal the bass from McCartney, and the video of the song is a rare tape that he has acquired. Sigh. There are, however, other clips of McCartney as a Beatle that are unique, though not enough to justify the cornball premise. The single entered the charts at number seventy-two at the end of May, 1989, just a couple of weeks after it was released. Six weeks later, in early July, it had climbed to number twenty-five and stalled there, which is kind of inexplicable considering how really good the song is. Perhaps it was the video. It lingered on the chart for three more weeks, and by the end of the month it was gone. The B-side is a mid-tempo rocker called “Flying to my Home,” a song that didn’t make it onto the original album. “My Brave Face,” is the last McCartney song to crack the top 40 in America, the last great single in an amazing career.